Friday, October 08, 2010

Next weekend I'll be performing a concert with my group, Chorus Austin. We will be doing the Mozart Mass in C-Minor which is, in all honesty, a simply amazing piece of choral work. If you can make it, you ought to come. Schedule and details are here, and you can check out the nifty glossy flier here. If nothing else, you should see how I look in a tuxedo. :)

I'm taking a gamble by bringing eight year old Ben along. I expect he'll pay attention to some of the music for twenty minutes and then hopefully read quietly during the rest. In order to get his interest up, I've been playing some movements for him on my iPod -- I tried to get him into classical music early in life, and this video turned out to be a fascinating way to demonstrate how fugues work. (The beginning of that piece, the part that everyone has heard in scary movies, is the toccata. The fugue begins at the 2:50 mark. A fugue is like the instrumental version of singing a "round", with a single theme that gets repeated by different voices, usually in different keys.)

Separating form from message

Of course I also had to explain the words, which are roughly the same as words that are in every mass. My chorus has sung a lot of masses (with Bach's B-Minor being my all-time favorite) so I know the words pretty well. It is basically an abridged Latin translation of the entire story of Jesus. They all start out with "Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison" ("Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy"). Then they move on to "Gloria in exceslis Deo" ("Glory to God in the highest"). There is a statement of faith in the credo, which is referenced in the title of this post. ("Credo in Unum Deum" means "I believe in one God." The "Non" was my own addition.)

Eventually they work up to introducing Jesus Christ ("Jesu Christe") and how he was crucified ("Crucifixus") after being betrayed by Pontius Pilate; then dead and buried ("sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus est") But then! Yay! He came back! ("Et resurrexit!") And everything was all better, and finally we live happily ever after, or at least we hope so. ("Dona nobis pacem", grant us peace.) There is also a bit in the about love for the one, true, holy Catholic church ("Et Unam Sanctam Catholicam et Apostolicam"), which you have to admit is an odd sentiment in the middle of Baptist country.

As a story, it's not too terrible. I mean, obviously I don't base my life around it, but you can look at it as a compelling superhero origin story. But it does get a little tedious when you consider the fact that it was virtually the only story expressed successfully through the song for several centuries in a row.

As I explained to Ben, not agreeing with the lyrics does not diminish the power of the music. The choral works of Bach and Mozart are among the greatest artistic achievements in human history, if I say so myself. Christians today are, of course, eager to take credit for this, saying that great art is made possible by the influence of God.

Secular Art

...Which is nonsense. One of my other favorite pieces of all time is "Carmina Burana," which I believe is in the short list of pieces that our director plans to put on the agenda in future seasons. Carmina Burana is essentially a satire of religious liturgies, full of Latin lyrics in full on praise of drinkin', gamblin', overeatin', and good old sexual frenzies. And it is a hell of a musical piece also.

As we've arrived in more modern times, there has been an explosion of creativity which for the first time in history is not mostly driven by the church. I'll stack up The Beatles and Rush against the musical greats of centuries gone by, and even John Williams (composer for movies such as "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," "Jurassic Park," and "Harry Potter") makes a pretty good secular showing with an orchestra.

Religion used to largely dominate the art profession. Why? Because religious institutions were the ones with piles of money, and you needed rich patrons to survive as a composer or painter or sculptor. Writing a mass or a requiem made good financial sense, not to mention the always present nebulous claims of the church that if you offer enough stuff to God then it will make it easier to get into heaven, back when the rules of entry were not so sharply defined as in a Jack Chick tract.

Rock me, obscene child

It's kind of interesting, if you think about it, that religion no longer dominates popular art. I'm not going to pick on Christian rock. In fact, I've heard individual rock selections expressing sincere religious themes that I liked, musically, very much. (Don't press me for examples, please. I cannot think of any off the top of my head, and if I remembered some then I'd probably embarrass myself by exposing my tastes.) But the point is, religion no longer dominates the music scene the way it did in the mid-to-late parts of the last millennium.

Likewise, I can think of very few movies that exist primarily to promote a religious message that have gotten much traction. There's The Passion of the Christ, of course; that did very well. A handful of historical classics like The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. But here, again, religious contributions are dwarfed by the very large number of excellent movies that have been made outside the umbrella of religion; and movies that do treat religious themes frequently take a critical or ambiguous view of the church. Was Casablanca a theatrical mass? Was Citizen Kane a liturgical requiem? I think not.

For a good example of the intersection of movies and classical music, there's Amadeus, an Academy Award winner which presents an entertaining (though thoroughly fictionalized) account of Mozart's life and work. A running theme throughout the movie is that Salieri, the villain/protagonist, worships a God who simply does not make any sense. Salieri initially believes that God loves great music and will reward his own religious fervor with the gift of great talent and success. Instead, he watches helplessly as great music is channeled through a Mozart who is portrayed as a "giggling, dirty creature" and an "obscene child."

The whole story of his epic failure at life is told to a young and naive priest, whose look of complete shock and disillusionment at the end of the movie has to be seen and enjoyed. For me, the movie highlights the fact, not that the universe is malevolent, but that by all appearances it doesn't actually care about your piety. Artistic messages are still in the eye of the beholder, and that's just my interpretation. But unlike a Latin mass, Amadeus is great art that doesn't directly praise and glorify God.

Sturgeon was right

The percentage of artistic works that portray a positive religious message has declined over time. This is a statement evangelists would agree with, and they'd use it as a sign of the moral decline of our times. I see it instead as an obvious result of the fact that religion is no longer the only game in town, which I hardly need to this audience say is a good thing.

You can partly credit this to Sturgeon's Law, which states: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Most new music that is produced sucks. Most new art that is produced sucks. Most blog posts suck. We romanticize the past because most of the crud has been filtered out by disappearing from the public consciousness. Now we are left with the impression that every playwright of the past was Shakespeare, and every musician of the past was Bach, and every painter was Rembrandt, and every statesman was Jefferson. There are just as many new great works of art being produced now; perhaps even more, since we have so many more tools to make art accessible; but it's buried under mountains of crud that hasn't been filtered out yet.

However, the crud of the past that is no longer with us, was also in large part financed by the church. Reaching back in history, we have much more material to choose from that is religious because that's just where artists went to get money.

I actually am kind of disappointed that so much of the art of the past has exactly the same lyrics. To my modern ear, it seems lazy (probably unjustly, given the circumstances). As I said, I'm not even saying that the gospels tell a bad story. It's just not the ONLY story they could have chosen. It's as if all movies had to be made about just one story. Maybe something from Shakespeare. Let's pick Henry V as an example. I really like Henry V, especially the Kenneth Branagh film version... his delivery of that inspirational speech cements Henry in my mind as one of the greatest military badasses of literature.

But suppose every movie was just a retelling Henry V, and not only that, they were expected to recycle most of the dialogue from the original Shakespeare version. Wouldn't that get boring?

I recognize, of course, that music is not a movie. The musical qualities of Mozart's Mass in C-Minor are on a separate dimension from the words they are expressing. Mozart also wrote a lot of symphonies, and those don't even have words. So you could argue that the lyrics don't matter.

I kind of think they do matter, though, because they are another piece of the art that could be employed to supply great and unique new sentiments, and they kind of don't. The music is influenced by the lyrics, so you can predict what kind of dynamic is called for at any point in a mass. Here's the Crucifixus again, it's all slow and somber like every Crucifixus. Then it gets loud and exultant with Et Resurrexit. Hosanna in Excelsis is joyful, etc. Now, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, they all wrote masses, and they all approached the subject with different sensibilities. They each have uniquely beautiful ways of capturing these emotions, but they're still just telling the same story. And I don't even think it's all that great a story.

Credo in intelligentibus

I want to wrap this up, so here's my credo. I believe that human beings are capable of producing massive amounts of crap and calling it art. I also believe that once in a while, some truly terrific stuff filters to the top which withstands the test of time. Sometimes the good stuff goes unrecognized and gets forgotten anyway. But I believe that people are sensitive enough that over time, a lot of great stuff has accumulated for all of us to share and enjoy.

I believe that people find inspiration in all different aspects of their lives. I believe that something doesn't have to be true in order to inspire beauty, but that truth is inherently beautiful and preferable. I believe that we should seek to understand more of our world, not less; and we should look for art and inspiration in all of the universe, not just a story that we tell ourselves to pretend that we know more than we really do.

15 comments:

How long ago did the great outpouring of secular art start? It seems to me the printing press had a lot to do with it, allowing people with less financial resources than the sectarian authorities to distribute their poetry and music and novels widely. Recording and broadcasting technology were probably vital to the spread of music. But I would imagine that secular music thrived even before the Enlightenment, in the inns and pubs and anywhere people gathered.

Talking strictly about music, it's essential to realize that the pre-renaissance music that survives in manuscripts only represents a small portion of actual performed music... due in part to the lack of printing press as soul_biscuit points out, but also to the novelty of music notation. It really is a peculiarity of western culture that music is WRITTEN DOWN, instead of being played from memory or improvised, largely due to the complication of developing a visual system that can adequately depict pitches and rhythms. Notational systems that developed in the middle ages were invented largely for the purpose of recording sacred music. While I certainly agree that medieval art was largely dominated by religion, the present body of surviving music may create a skewed image of the balance between sacred and secular music.

"But I would imagine that secular music thrived even before the Enlightenment, in the inns and pubs and anywhere people gathered."

Absolutely. The troubadours/trouvères/ minnesingers are probably the best known example of secular musicians of the Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, written secular music became increasingly common.

This is not news to you, I'm sure, but I think it is always important to remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were professional musicians. They worked on commission and salary basis and had to write what they they were paid to write. They didn't often get to pick their subjects. Bach had to have a new cantata every f-ing week based on some biblical text; that was his job. Of course he believed in the religion, if he had so much as hinted that he didn't, he would have been fired and then invited to a barbecue where he was the one being barbecued. Those were some very mean and dangerous times. Which, to my mind, only makes the accomplishments more awe inspiring.

As a Latin teacher, I have to say that in Classical Latin, credo takes a dative not in + ablative. So, no need for the "in" and the ending is still fine b/c dat and abl is the same. Sorry. Really, I can't help it. Esp since we talked about that very construction today in class. And yes, that means it should be credo deo. But the Mass isn't classical Latin, I am guessing. So, really it all depends on what period of Latin you want your credo associated with. You can delete my comment after you read it and not post it. I don't want to look like an asshole. :)

While religious influence on music was greater 2 centuries ago, it wasn't universal. Mozart, composer of the C minor mass, also wrote Cosi fan tutte (theme: fiancee swapping), Don Giovanni (theme: womanizing), and the Magic Flute (theme: freemasonry). Not the sort of stuff you expect that the Catholic Church of the time would have been thrilled about.

I'm a written-down-music centric musician as well. I sing in several choirs and do a lot of composing.

I've thought often of the conflict of being a non-believer and being involved in a tradition that owes it's existence to the scholarship of the early church. Not to mention the fact that singing religious music is pretty much unavoidable if you're in a choir.

I'm still not totally sure why singing those texts doesn't make me feel as icky as hearing a sermon but I definitely feel like it's more about the music and the sensuality of it rather than the message of the texts.

It's an interesting subject I'd like to see brought up more in these circles.

Back when I was a Catholic, those drawn-out, Latin-text Gregorian chants would make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up... but I don't know if it was the text that did it, or the striking tonality of the a capella singing. :-/

Something that has always intrigued me is religion and its connection to architecture and acoustics. I have a nominally Catholic friend (although her and I have had some heated arguments in the past!) that is very involved in her chamber choir. She has invited me to hear her sing a number of times and the thing that has struck me was the way that the voices interact with the space that they sang in.

I tried to envisage a time in the not too recent past when the only large sonorous buildings that lay people were allowed into were the churches (larger buildings being owned or accessed only by wealthier segments of the population). These buildings were purpose built to create a reverberation that simply wasn't heard except in specific naturally occurring structures and I think it gave the songs and sermons a quality that sounded truly supernatural to the listeners of the time. The differences between the folk music of the age, played and sung in wooden structures by small groups of people and the grandiose sound within a church or cathedral were so incredibly different as to say that the latter was 'divine'. Such pure harmonics that reflect back to the listener and trail off long after the note is sung gave the songs and speech an otherworldly quality that no one had really heard before.

Flash forward a few hundred years when secular music halls were built, the acoustics were retained. Flash forward to the present day and anyone with a laptop can call up cutting edge convolution reverb (an echo effect that mimics actual spaces, you can put your vocal track in anything from the taj mahal to the ATLAS chamber of the LHC) but the effect on the listener is the same. The sound was once only ever heard in 'God's House' but has been secularised.

@Ian - I figured as much about the "in." If it were me, I would want to disassociate my Latin from church Latin. :) Good call on the nullum.

As far as art and the church...I have visited numerous museums both here and abroad and always wonder what we would have if all those artists didn't have to paint God themes all those centuries. I like the paintings for their artisitic merits, but as my aunt and I joke when we look at the 100th painting of Jesus that year..."That guy, *again*?"

That was a great post and one I was sort of hoping one of you would make one day, as it fascinates me. I am a great admirer of Mozart myself and of great music. I don't have time to comment on this post as much as I want so I will come back to it, but here is a few thought: I think what religious people often mistake aesthetic and devotion, just like they confuse moral and devotion. When one enjoys Mozart's mass or requiem, it is first and foremost an aesthetic, and therefore physical, experience. In a way, those earthly feelings were hijacked by religious people, which is a shame.

And let's not forget that Mozart also gave us one of the most seductive, libertine and blaspheming character in operatic history with Don Giovanni...

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PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.The Atheist Experience is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin. This independently-run blog (not sponsored by the ACA) features contributions from current and former hosts and co-hosts of the show.